BARB MCGRATH: LEVENE ALUMNA

From her eleventh floor office at Saskatchewan Polytechnic Barb McGrath has a great view of the U of R campus, just one connection to the place where she completed her MBA in 2008. In fact, she was a member of the first cohort to graduate from the Executive MBA program offered by the Levene Graduate School of Business. Since she was working full-time for Conexus Credit Union at the time, the rest of her life was put on hold, she says. “I always knew I would do an executive MBA, and for me it was better than doing one course at a time. One of the benefits was the connections I made with my fellow students,” she observes, “because we worked together on evenings and weekends, and discussed things by phone and email. I still keep in touch with people who were in that cohort, and with instructors. Adult learners have different ways of building relationships that often endure.” After starting her family McGrath worked as a sessional instructor teaching business communication at the U of R. She is now Associate Vice President for Communications and Marketing with Saskatchewan Polytechnic, while wearing her volunteer hat as a board member for the Levene Alumni Association. The Association came into being four years ago after Dr. Ron Camp, the Associate Dean for the Levene School, reached out to a handful of alumni to gauge support for the idea. McGrath was one of four who stepped up to launch the fledgling association. “It was a marketing project, so of course I was attracted to it,” McGrath says. “I also believe the connections that alumni maintain with their alma mater and their level of involvement are good measures of the strength of the school they graduated from. I wanted to be a part of that.” The group (now five key people) spent the first year getting organized, and surveying alumni to find out what they would like from an association. Not surprisingly, McGrath says, the top priorities are professional development opportunities in key areas, networking and social events. “Our hope is to build stronger local and global relationships, to bring the community together.” One of the key building blocks was to develop a partnership with the University of Regina Alumni Association, which has adopted the Levene Association as a Chapter. The URAA provides vital administrative and website support to help the Levene group reach out to its alumni. “We’re not sure, but we think we have a core group of about 800, which is a good working number,” McGrath says. “Now the challenge is to grow awareness about the association and member engagement to it, to increase participation.” Looking back over the past four years, the feedback from alumni has been positive, she notes, and the association has been successful in finding its niche within the larger world of U of R alumni.